Grouper once said releasing an album was like trying to secretly sink a heavy object in a lake: “Find a quiet corner, gently slip it under the surface, watch the ripples for a moment, and steal away.” She was referring to her end of the process—the immediate aftermath of putting one’s work into the world—but the analogy works the other way around, too. Listening to a Grouper record, meaning generally evades me, or at least the kind I can articulate does; I grasp at an expression of exactly what a song is “about” as it slips through my fingers like water. Sometimes it feels like the record is sinking through me, ending up somewhere deep and unreachable, leaving me with the dazed feeling you get when you die in your dream.
The seven songs on Grid of Points, the latest album from Liz Harris, were written and recorded in a week and a half during a residency in the wide-open space of Ucross, Wyoming in 2014. She describes the process being abruptly halted by sickness, like a sign from the world that the album was complete despite its slightness. Or rather, because of its slightness. “The intimacy and abbreviation of this music allude to an essence that the songs’ lyrics speak more directly of,” Harris writes. “The space left after matter has departed, a stage after the characters have gone, the hollow of some central column, missing.”
Lately, it’s felt as if Harris has taken measures to translate that essence more directly, with as little interference as possible. 2014’s spare and devastating Ruins forewent the layers and layers of effects pedals that made her best-known releases so displacing, focusing on just the piano, her voice, and the ambient sounds of her recording space. Grid of Points follows this trajectory to a place that feels even more wind-blown and remote, its compositions shaped as much by negative space as they are by instrumentation; the mundane sounds of earthly existence—an empty room, an inhale—are not background noise but essential parts of the whole. It is easy to find yourself hanging on to every press of the piano’s sustain pedal, holding your breath as Harris preserves what is left of the note until there is nothing at all.
But where Ruins showcased Harris’ vocals as uncharacteristically legible, Grid of Points burrows back into ambiguity, the vocal harmonies overlapping in foggy indeterminacy even when they are unaccompanied by any other instrument. And yet they are more heavenly than ever, Harris’ melodies drifting in almost liturgical directions; on “The Races,” not even a minute long, her voice sounds as though it’s echoing off cathedral marble. Of its handful of lyrics, I could recognize only three abbreviated lines: “Smells like rain/It is raining/The races.”
Typed out, these lines—and others across the album’s 22-minute span—might as well be haiku poems cloaked in song form. Imposing formal restrictions on one’s work can have a weirdly freeing effect, and it would seem that Harris’ increasingly minimal arsenal of instruments is akin to the best haiku poets’ austere character count—less a strict rulebook than an exercise in expression at its most essential. Sometimes, that includes language itself. For the first minute of “Blouse,” Harris seems to be singing words that are not quite words, somewhere between a heavy sigh and a sob. But the feeling is translated clearly, the ache of the melody saying everything that needs to be said.
The sparseness of Grid of Points creates a sense of hyper-awareness; as such, I’ve found it hard to listen the album seated in front of a laptop, compelled instead to wander out into the world. I recently found myself on the shore of a nearby beach, where my thoughts had turned to death—an event I sometimes imagine should be soundtracked by Grouper’s music as a universal rule. Even as it floats just beyond my literal comprehension, the album seems to be explicitly about grief, though I suspect other listeners might have similarly strong convictions that it is about something else entirely. Grouper records are like that—as though the way Harris sublimates herself into her world leaves space for its audience to become its protagonists. Sitting on the beach, I think a helicopter might be overhead. In fact, the walls of the room in which Harris recorded “Breathing,” Grid of Points’ last song, seems to have collapsed away—a visceral wide-opening. For the album’s final two minutes, the only sounds are those of a steadily oncoming train; and then nothing.
